Celebrity endorsement is a common creative approach for literally any product category in any market around the world. The celebrity has the stopping power to help overcome the first hurdle that the brand faces in any communication. If the audience skips your ad on YouTube, you won’t even be able to start a conversation with your target customer. Celebrity can add credibility to your brand and hence increase your chance to cut through a cluttered market. More importantly, celebrities are a brand themselves. They possess particular perceived values and personalities. Therefore, if the right celebrity is used, there is a chance that the positive qualities of the celebrity can be transferred to the brand.
It is a double-edged sword of using celebrity endorsement as a strategy for launching a new brand. As said, celebrities can help to fast-track the awareness and recognition of the brand. Yet, David Ogilvy has once said, “The audience has the tendency to remember the celebrity but forgetting the product.” Ironically, the more popular the celebrity is, the more overwhelming he or she will be. And the more likely that they will overshadow the brand that he or she is supposed to endorse. Also, a famous celebrity is unlikely to endorse only one brand, making the association between the celebrity and the brand even more difficult.
In this day and age, when the brand is more than just an intangible concept to arouse people’s curiosity towards a product, celebrity endorsement has taken on a new form and different approach. The passive way of praising a product by reading out a script will not go down well for today’s audience. The consumers can effortlessly find out if the celebrities are genuinely using the products behind the scene. The audience expects more meaty comments on how good (or bad) the product is, based on the actual user’s experience. That is why the so-called KOL’s have emerged as another alternative for brand-owners to consider as story-tellers. They may not be movie stars or pop stars, but they command a different level of respect and, more importantly, a deeper level of engagement with their followers. They are supposed to possess certain expertise and credibility for a particular product category. As they care a lot about their own reputation, they will try to offer genuine and helpful tips to their followers when offering their reviews of the products.
Collaborating with celebrities, KOL’s or even KOC’s (key opinion consumers) has become an essential and ongoing task for any brand. Dedicated resources are also allocated to fully leverage the most viable combination of the different collaborators for the various occasions by maintaining a year-round presence on social media.
While the format of working with the different types of celebrities may continue to evolve, the brands that are most savvy and efficient in the use of celebrities, such as Rolex, Nike, and Cartier, etc., will never rely or depend on the celebrities to build their brands. They all have solid and precise brand positioning grounded on actual superior product performance. They use celebrities as a tool to enhance the story of each communication, be it a grand image campaign or an everyday social post. Celebrity endorsement will always have value in brand-building, but it should be viewed as a complementary element to the communication rather than the solution to any complex marketing challenge.